Sexgod

Installation with two mothers; one with white and one with black skin colour. The sounds of the bodies – heartbeat, breathing, digestion, blood circulation, etc. – are amplified.

Sound art: Volker Sieben

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Sexgod

“I find Tea's works monumental, megalomaniacal, and fearless. She works objectively as if she were a researcher.” Pirjetta Brander on her colleague's work

Tea Mäkipää's installation Sexgod (2003) consists of a room with two naked middle-aged women, one black, one white, lying on light tables. The room is filled with sounds, the aural inner landscape of the human body. Both women in Mäkipää‘s work are mothers – they have already once relinquished their bodies to others by giving birth. This time around their bodies are appropriated by art, which is serving up the naked bodies for all visitors to see.

Mäkipää's work asks by which right art, as one area of visual culture, has offered and continues to offer the female body as an object for voyeuristic -pleasure-seeking and a prey for the consuming gaze. This installation also raises questions about age: in our nudity-peddling culture only the youthful (women) are allowed to display their unwrinkled bodies, whereas the middle-aged (woman’s) body is considered taboo, ugly, and repulsive.

Tea Mäkipää's installation raises questions about how visual culture – from fashion magazines and advertisements to art – mingles looking, beauty, and desirability in order to produce notions and conceptions of ideal femininity, to be voyeuristically consumed by others, including women themselves. In feminist thinking, it is common to argue that in Western culture, images featuring women support, presume, and participate in the construction of femininity and ideal womanliness. This means that images operate as a social institution alongside the family, school, church, and other media in producing a concept of ideal femininity, i.e. teaching us which kind of femininity is desirable or undesirable.

In her installation Sexgod, Tea Mäkipää tackles this issue. She uses art as a critical tool in order to question the literal consumption of women in the most typical way of viewing art – pleasure-driven voyeurism. By installing naked, living, middle-aged women on a podium, Mäkipää problematises the structures of the voyeuristic gaze – no doubt these women are available to the pleasure-seeking eye but, at the same time, they are also able to return the gaze, to look back. Sexgod illuminates those mechanisms of power and viewing, which define the norms of the “ideal” and “beautiful” modern woman. In returning the gaze, the exposed women make the voyeur the object of their gaze. In this sense, Sexgod can be seen as the proposition that art is simultaneously a social technique in the construction/deconstruction of representations of women and femininity, and a device for looking and being looked at.